I didn’t watch as many movies in May as I did in April because I’ve had a couple of freelance projects break dance their way into my life. However, compared to the average person I definitely spent an un-Christian amount of time watching movies. What can I say? I don’t have a spouse and when the weekends roll around I’m a bit of a homebody. I’m either spending 2/3 of the day preparing for a show or laying half-awake on my dirty old couch watching Bill Pullman playing a saxophone. Anyway, here’s what I watched, separated into weird little categories that only make sense to me.

I. Angsty Murder

The very first movie I watched this month was The Wachowski Starship‘s debut feature Bound (B+), an erotic thriller about a gangster’s girlfriend (Jennifer Tilly) who falls in love with a sexy plumber (Gina Gershon). I had seen parts of this movie when it played on the Encore channel in high school, but I had never sat down and watched it from start to finish. It’s a fantastically well-made little indie thriller that manages to be unpredictable and creative on a tiny ass budget. Many shots were recreated and perfected in Lana and Lilly‘s next feature, the quaint little tech indie The Matrix. Christopher Meloni also has a memorable bit role as a Nepo Baby gangster feuding with Tilly‘s douche lord boyfriend, perfectly played by Joe Pantoliano. You can stream Bound on Amazon Prime.

A much more disjointed and less confident indie thriller about murder is Tim Hunter‘s River’s Edge (B-), about a gaggle of disillusioned teens (including Crispin Glover and Keanu Reeves) who discover the body of the girlfriend who was murdered by their seriously demented chubby friend (Daniel Roebuck – acting MVP here). The movie is shot well and paced all right, but it features this distracting TV movie score that overdramatizes everything. It’s genuinely jarring and hinders the movie quite a bit. Almost as much as the thoroughly unconvincing performance by Crispin Glover as the goofball friend, which also clashes with the film’s tone. Dennis Hopper shows up as the town drug dealer, and that 100% checks out. River’s Edge is streaming with inconvenient commercial breaks on Tubi.

II. Yorgos Corner

The trailer for Yorgos Lathinmos’ new movie Poor Things recently dropped, and it’s one of my most anticipated movies of 2023. I really like Yorgos Lathinmos. Even when he doesn’t “knock it out of the park,” so to speak, he creates unique, exciting stories with fleeting moments of brilliance throughout. Before Poor Things gets released in September, I’ll rewatch all of Yorgos‘ movies.

I started with the 2018 Oscar winner The Favourite (A), which remains my favorite film by the director. My sole complaint about Lathinmos‘ movies are that the characters and dialogue often feel too rote, even though they’re obviously that way by design. Having another writer for this allowed there to be more vibrant and likable characters that are then fed through the Lathinmos perspective grinder to create a nightmare you can end up emotionally investing in. Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz are brilliant in this, but Emma Stone delivers a career best performance, she’s so goddamn funny here. I also want to shout out Nicholas Hoult who is just as excellent as the three leads but with a much smaller part. The Favourite is available for rental or purchase on VOD but I just popped in the blu-ray I own.

When I first saw The Killing of a Sacred Deer (B) in theaters I was really put off by it, but seeing it for the second time six years later deepened my appreciation. This is Lathinmos‘ least accessible movie, a tragedy that can’t evoke an emotional response despite having the big star talents of Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, and Alicia Freakin Silverstone. Maybe that’s the point, this movie just isn’t entirely my bag. It’s about a surgeon and his family being politely stalked by the son (acting MVP Barry Keoghan) of a man Farrell accidentally killed during surgery. Or maybe the anesthesiologist (theater and HBO’s Bill Camp) killed him. I guess surgeons and anesthesiologists claim only the other can kill a patient, at least in the reality of this movie. If any surgeons are reading this, can you please let me know if this is actually true? Anyway, the characters in this really talk like robots but you get why Lathinmos is doing this – to show a surgeon having the same clinical emotional detachment in a life-shattering personal situation as they would in the operating room. This is a film I respect far more than I enjoy, which I don’t enjoy watching at all. This is truly some Michael Haneke-level torture for the audience. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is streaming on Showtime.

Saturday morning felt like the ideal time to ingest Lathinmos‘ second feature and first big hit, the Oscar-nominated Dogtooth (A-). It might not be as much of a downer as The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but it’s maybe his most disturbing effort. It’s about the dangers of home-schooling and in a greater sense, living under a fascist rule. It’s actually about this Greek family where the rigid, control-freak dad has some cushy government job and he never lets his family leave the house. His three kids look like they’re all in their twenties but are treated like they’re ten. Their mother, also sheltered and not allowed to leave the house, is a hybrid of abuser and victim. This is one hell of a Mediterranean nightmare that gave me a bunch of ideas for abusing people. I own the DVD but you can rent it for like $4 on VOD.

I was feeling romantic last Tuesday, so I figured I’d re-watch The Lobster (B+). Like most Lathinmos productions, this is a tough watch only somewhat smoothed out by its clever and very specific sense of humor. The first half is a near perfect satire but as the film transitions into the second half, a lot of the humor is thinned out and a lot of the themes are brought too close into focus. It’s get to be a bit irritatingly on-the-nose. Still, Olivia Colman and Ben “Paddington” Whishaw are outstanding in their comedic supporting roles. The Lobster is streaming on Max.

I just didn’t have the time to check out Alps (?) or Kinetta (?) yet. I will before Poor Things drops in September. Promise that.

III. Lynch Miss

The only David Lynch movie besides Dune that I just don’t like, I figured I’d give 1997’s Lost Highway (C+) another shot but it let me down all over again. For me, it’s lacking that kinetic energy and joy juice most Lynch movies are overflowing with. Part of it is due to the fact he cast the world’s most boring actor – Bill Pullman -as the lead. Even with Lynch‘s powerful and poetic imagination, Pullman threatens to put my ass to sleep. Luckily he gets more or less replaced by Balthazar Getty at the end of the first act, but if I’m being honest he’s really not that much more engaging than Pullman. R.I.P. Balthazar, apologies for the dig, but I gotta be honest here.

Lost Highway has as loose of a plot as a David Lynch movie often has — an awful jazz musician (Pullman) and his lady friend (Patricia Arquette) start being harassed by a mysterious killer with no eyebrows (real-life killer Robert Blake). Shit spirals out of control from there. This movie is technically well made, the editing is fantastic, and pretty much every performance, besides the two I mentioned, are inspired – Blake and Robert Loggia as an unhinged gangster obsessed with driving etiquette particularly stand out – but at 135 minutes, the movie is a real slog. There are too many dead spots between good scenes for me to recommend. Even if Gary Busey shows up as a nice biker dad. Lost Highway is like $4 on VOD.

IV. Dahlble Feature

My co-worker was nice enough to lend me his legendarily old DVD copy of John Dahl‘s Red Rock West and when I found out The Last Seduction was streaming on Peacock, I decided to do a little Dahlble feature of sorts. Like that? I think it’s an ok pun, it’s nothing crazy but it makes sense since his name is ‘Dahl‘ right?

I started off with 1994’s The Last Seduction (C-), a movie that, according to Roger Ebert, was deemed ineligible at the 1995 Oscars because it premiered on HBO versus the theaters. Siskel and Ebert really loved this film, as did a lot of critics, which I find a bit off. I found it to be, at best, rather clumsy filmmaking and at worst, a deeply misogynistic crime thriller written by a dude with a seriously warped view of women. Linda Fiorentino is the femme fatale in this who absolutely hates men. She’s evil and always scheming, so much so that if cartoon smoke clouds shot out of her ears, it wouldn’t feel much out of place. Despite how dumb this is, so dumb in fact that they cast boring-ass Bill Pullman again, Fiorentino manages to overcome the shaky material and deliver a layered performance. She deserved a better movie.

I was considering just going to bed, but God told me Red Rock West (B) would be better, and boy were they right! This is one of the most underrated crime thrillers of the 1990s and a real damn shame it’s not streaming anywhere. You can buy an old DVD copy on Amazon for $43 though. Anyway, this stars Nicolas Cage as an honest dude who is finding that telling the truth about his leg injury is costing him serious dinero. After losing out on a construction gig, he goes to a diner for coffee when J.T. Walsh approaches him. Thinking Cage is someone else, he thanks him for showing up to the job. Cage, not wanting to miss out on a pay day, plays along but once he realizes J.T. Walsh has hired him to kill his wife, it’s toooooooo late to back out. So he plays dumb and tries to warn the wife (Lara Flynn Boyle) before the actual hitman (a very Dennis Hopper) rolls into town. There’s a lot of unpredictable twists and turns, but you’ll never know cause you can’t stream this anywhere.

V. Cummin’ Down Hard

It’s hard to imagine a more flavorless and benign 90s action thriller than 1998’s Hard Rain (D), an achingly dull and mind-numbing piece of action filmmaking. Unsurprisingly, it was relegated to the January theatrical release slot back in 1998. Maybe all that rain washed away the flavor from this movie, a film that some not real person at NBC-TV called “a compelling, fast-paced thriller of the first order.” It’s just Christian Slater as an armored truck driver running around a flooded street while a super boring Morgan Freeman (as a criminal) and Randy Quaid (as a corrupt small town sheriff) are after him. Hard Rain is streaming for free with ads on PlutoTV.

Much more entertaining is Can’t Hardly Wait (C), a seriously dumb, derivative but rather enjoyable plunge into nostalgia for me. This is how I imagined high school would be back in fourth grade, and I was definitely disappointed. It was way harder to get drugs and alcohol and fun parties than what they show here. It’s nuts how many 2000s actors are in this movie, right before their careers would marginally take off. Sure, Jennifer Love-Hewitt and Seth Green were already huge, but there’s also Jason Segel, Melissa Joan Hart, Selma Blair, Clea DuVall, Jerry O’Connell, and Breckin Meyer. Can’t Hardly Wait is streaming on Max.

VI. Top 5 Rewatches

1. Burning (A)
2. Memento (A)
3. House (A)
4. Drag Me to Hell (B+)
5. Serial Mom (B)

Did you ever watch Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite and go, “Wow, I wonder what other South Korean movies are this good?” The answer is Lee Chang-dong‘s Burning, the biggest and best cinematic mind-fuck since David Lynch‘s Mullholland Drive. Steven Yeun (Beef, Minari, The Walking Dead) plays a sociopathic trust fund baby and its his very best performance.

Memento remains Christopher Nolan‘s best film in my book, because it’s not just a brilliant technical exercise devoid of any emotional intelligence. Memento first and foremost is a story of what any human being would be capable of if they couldn’t experience guilt. Guy Pearce delivers one of the most underrated performances of the 2000s as Leonard Shelby, a man who can’t remember shit.

Look, not every movie sets out to be Citizen Kane. House sets out to be House, and it succeeds on every level. This is the single most bizarre motion picture I’ve ever seen and the fact it got made is proof aliens might existed as the studio execs who greenlit this movie. Given the level of cunning, uniqueness, nerve, and talent displayed on the screen, it’s a bummer that this was filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi‘s only international hit.

The worst era for horror films has to be the 2000s. With Dark Castle pictures, Platinum Dunes, Hills Have Eyes remakes, and gratuitous rape scenes in almost every American R-rated horror film of this time, it was a depressing time to get scared at the movies. Saw and Hostel were the biggest hits, and those franchises stink. The best R-rated horror movies were foreign imports from Guillermo Del Toro‘s The Devil’s Backbone, to Tomas Alfredson‘s Let the Right One In, all the way over to South Korea with Park Chan-wook‘s Thirst and Bong Joon-ho‘s The Host. Those movies are all super heavy though, way heavier than Sam Raimi‘s campy possession throwback, Drag Me to Hell, a horror comedy uncommonly good for its era. Allison Lohman and Justin Long are both fantastic, and Raimi manages to land just as many laughs as it does jump scares.

Finally, I went to a fun move night at a friend’s friend’s house who had an actual small theater built in his house. We had to come with three suggestions which were then put on a spinning wheel. The man’s wife came out for a second to spin the wheel, then went back in her room. Much to my surprise, the wheel landed on one of my picks – John Waters’ immortal classic, Serial Mom. I love this movie, it’s a really sharp satire that maybe doesn’t reach the heights of the best satires, but it’s campy and fun in its own unique way allowing a great actress like Kathleen Turner deliver maybe her best work. Waters has a boner for 50s.

VII. VANDERPUMP RULES (SEASONS 1-4)

Holy shit, you guys. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’ve lost me. I have gone completely off the deep end, down a Vanderpump rabbit hole. Hmm, “Vanderpump Rabbit Hole.” Sounds like something Lala would do for a Range Rover.

I’ve watched 72 episodes of Vanderpump Rules (💩) in the past month, and I actually don’t want to die. This is fascinating reality television, the first one in fact to fully engage me. I’ve seen a handful of Jersey Shores back in the day as well as The Hills and O.G. Real Housewives NJ, but all are far less compelling, funny, and tragic on an epic scale as Vanderpump Rules. Everything that happens to these characters seems so inevitable and in most cases, richly deserved.

Welcome to L.A. where everyone wants to be a star and young, untalented hopefuls try to manage their dreams while serving crispy chicken in a bougie restaurant owned by Lisa Vanderpump. They form alliances, break them, and re-form them, all the while bickering, drinking and sometimes physically assaulting each other. Who do you root for? I mean, who do you even identify with when everyone is merely different shades of materialistic, shallow, and needlessly cruel. Also, they happen to be really really hot. Guys and girls. Everyone is hot on this show. This is the most frightening reflection of white privilege I’ve seen since starting Succession.

Season 1

_{from left to right: Jax, Stassi, Katie, Lisa Vanderpump, Tom Sandoval, Schaena, Kristen}

We meet the Queen B of the show, Stassi Schroeder. She’s an entitled brat who verbally assaults people she perceives as a threat. She threatened to cut off her boyfriend’s penis , mount it on a chopstick, and take it to the closest Chinese restaurant to make fried rice with it. She also talked about decapitating a girl she doesn’t like at work and binding her body with chains on a “disgusting pick-up truck.” She’s dating a nice idiot named Jax Taylor who kind of looks like the white boy version of the popular Mortal Kombat character. Wikipedia says his dad is “Maltese”, but I googled that and found it’s a breed of dog. That can’t be right, right? Anyway, they are dating and fighting because Jax is in his early 30s and Stassi in her early 20s and she pays his rent/takes care of all of his shit.

We also have Tom Sandoval, a cold, calculating sociopath who wants to be a rockstar. He’s dating Kristen Doute, who is also super crazy but not as calculating as this fucking guy.

Katie Maloney is the stereotypical mean girl’s best friend. You get the feeling she feels pressure to constantly please her Queen B and talk trash about people, but wouldn’t be that mean if she wasn’t around such toxic people. She’s dating this slippery but surprisingly not hateable weasel named Tom Schwartz.

All hell breaks loose when a new girl starts at the restaurant, Scheana Shay, threatens Stassi‘s status as “the hot one.” She also has teeth problems and makes pop music.

In the end of this season, it’s revealed that Jax, who we thought was the good guy, is actually the villain of the season and has been cheating since before the series even began!

Season 2

Overall, this is the best season of the show I’ve seen. The arc is brutal and downright Shakespearean in how it doles out karmic justice. Jax is single and trying his hardest to better himself and win Stassi back. Stassi is on top with her friends Kristen and Katie, and not even entertaining the idea of taking Jax back. Well, maybe a little.

The real pressing relationship issues are coming from Sandoval and Kristen‘s 100% all natural shit show of a partnership.

Everything comes to a head this season with a giant cheating scandal – this guy Jax who for most of last season we thought was this nice dude, is actually a TOTAL FUCKING ASSHOLE. He apparently got some girl pregnant in Vegas and is a cheating scoundrel. S-C-O-U-N-D-R-E-L. But that’s NOT EVEN THE BIGGEST THING. The person he cheated on Stassi with was Kristen, and they did it twice! Kristen admits this to Stassi in front of her boyfriend, Tom Sandoval.

The reunion was a fire show! Explosions of emotions and torn hearts bleeding, everyone crying and threatening to walk out. This season did introduce one of the least grating characters on the show, Ariana. Kristen spends the whole season accusing her boyfriend, Tom Sandoval, of hooking up with Ariana and in the reunion, it’s revealed they. are now dating and that was true. Both Tom Sandoval and Kristen were cheating on each other with other people. Well, only once according to Tom Sandoval and Ariana, but it does make a guy wonder, I’ll tell ya.

NOTE – Jax breaks up with a girl at a pizza parlor in this season and says, “You never spend money on a break up meal. It’s like betting on a sick horse.” Cut to him scooping cheap ass pizza out onto his date’s paper plate.

Season 3

MOTHERFUCKING JAMES KENNEDY. That feeling when the show you watch introduces its best/loudest character. James Kennedy is a total piece of shit but he’s the best unstructured reality tv show performer on the show. I’d vote for him at the Emmys. Even starting in Season 3, episodes dip in places he’s not in. He’s the most outrageous, rootin’ tootin’, foul-mouthed hootin’ villain since Captain Hook.

Guys, Shaena goes beserk at her wedding this season. It’s a beautiful ceremony but she pays $3000 for a wedding planner in L.A. and gets poorly executed music cues. She makes the band play the bride march twice, and it’s a super long song, at an outdoor wedding, in the heat. She marries the ultra-quiet Shay, who is revealed to have a pill addiction. One of the saddest things this season is watching this poor guy tag along to his wife’s parties and having her be like, “Oh just drink a normal amount.” But, she takes responsibility for that in the reunion episodes and says she was ignorant on addiction, so I have to hand it to her. She’s sometimes a bit much, but she’s one of the least pathological people on this show….so far…

Also Kristen tries to set up Tom Sandoval for cheating in front of Ariana, by having this girl fly out from Miami to confront him at his job. Tom Sandoval and Kristen have a heart to heart about always loving each other even if they aren’t boning, but Kristen misinterprets it as I have to get Ariana out of the picture. This snowballs into a lot of crazy shit.

Things break down further between Tom Sandoval and Jax, with Tom Sandoval having a real hard time accepting Jax would sleep with his girfriend of six years (Kristen).

MOTHERFUCKING JAMES KENNEDY is dating Kristen and is now ex-best friends with Tom Sandoval. They were roommates who were going to make music together, BUT Kristen wanted to dig at Tom Sandoval and date his friend. Tom Sandoval and James have another major feud this season, a lot of people are enemies with Tom Sandoval.

And a new girl, Lala, is introduced who proves to be another very entertaining persona to have on this show. All the girls are super challenged by her presence and Lala knows how to generate animosity from them. She begins hooking up with James and then things go on and off again and they settle on being best friends who make out a little.

Season 4

Crime has entered the sleepy community of Sur.

Jax has gotten drunk in Hawaii and stolen a pair of designer sunglasses. The cops have arrested him. This is a felony charge and Tom Schwartz has to put up like eleven thousand dollars for bail or something. Jax brought his new girlfriend, Britney, a nice Kentucky woman who moved in with Jax for God knows what reason, to Hawaii with him on the Sur friend’s trip, leaving a very bad boyfriend impression.

Back at the restaurant, Lisa is furious and penalizes Jax. The threat of having to go to prison in Hawaii also surfaces for Jax. It’s a bad season for Jax, but he brought almost all of it onto himself.

Stassi is off the show and has basically burned her bridge to Lisa, who can barely stand to look at her. Something involving pay off money for a leaked Stassi sex tape. I think the extorter was only asking for $900, that’s embarrassing. Both Stassi and Kristen show up to Tom Schwartz and Katie‘s engagement party at Lisa’s house, which drives Lisa nuts. Lala picks a fight with Kristen during a long-winded awkward speech Kristen is giving. Also, Jax and James fight a shit ton.

Jax continues to be a crappy boyfriend. Before he moves out Britney to live with him in L.A., he’s trying to have sex with Lala who ends up confronting him and his new girlfriend during some stupid trip they went on. Jesus, it’s impossible to keep up with these assholes’ trips, they take so many! You know what I did for Memorial Day? Watched The Patriot with Mel Gibson in my living room.

Season 4 wasn’t my favorite season, but James Kennedy really comes into his own here as the wildly self-destructive, self-loathing wannabe DJ that has better comedic timing than everybody. I’ll keep watching and next month I’ll probably review Seasons 5-8.